Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Anyone defending the idea that the people of the states in America have the right to decide their own laws on matters not explicitly assigned to the federal government in the U.S. Constitution will almost inevitably have someone appear, like the zombie in the Woods– Murphy videos , moaning, "Slavery!" What is amusing here is that such zombies have things exactly backwards: there was no national consensus to outlaw slavery, and the only thing enabling some parts of the United States to be free of this egregious institution was... states' rights! It was only the fact that northern states could ban this practice unilaterally that created a large block of the country where slaveholding interests did not have political power, thus enabling the elimination of slavery in the entire country. Hat tip to historian Joseph Stromberg for his advice on this post. UPDATE: And of course, sometimes, states' rights were employed to enable bad things, like segregation in the An...

Stark ( Bearing False Witness ) notes that while slavery was hardly questioned in antiquity, the Catholic Church gradually eliminated it in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. When Aquinas condemned slavery as "contrary to natural law," this soon became the official Church position. Nevertheless, some Church officials, even some popes, continued to own slaves. But some popes engaged in fornication and had children out of wedlock, despite official Church opposition to sex outside of marriage. And the Spanish and Portuguese imperialists often continued to enslave people, despite Church opposition. For instance, Spain colonized the Canary Islands in the early 1400s, and started enslaving the islanders.  This prompted Pope Eugene IV to declare that "these people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without exaction or reception of any money" (quoted on 171). In the 1500s, Pope Paul II asserted that "the same Indians and all other p...

A little while ago, I asked , "Would Aristotle have thought other-directed wage workers to be slaves?" Well, I still am not sure of the answer to that; but now I am sure that Cicero so thought them: "Vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill ; for in their case the very wages they receive is a pledge of their slavery." --  De Officiis The key thing here is not what contractual basis the works takes place under -- whether I own you or I pay you -- it is whether you work (almost) entirely under my direction, or you have active control over some non-minor part of your labor. The artistically skilled craftsman accepts wages, but is not a slave because he directs -- indeed, must direct, in that his employer does not have his skill -- a large part of his own labor. The slave is not a slave because he is owned (although he may be), but because he does not own his own time . I think this i...